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With the new ISO9001:2015 the stakeholder analysis has got a much more prominent position in the Quality management system. Of course, every company knows their most important stakeholders. However, not every stakeholder is always well understood or taken into consideration when major decisions are taken. A good stakeholder analysis gives the company an up to date list of all stakeholders and how to manage them.

Identify stakeholder

Identifying the most important stakeholders isn’t all that hard. Most companies have stakeholders like:

  • Customers
  • Suppliers
  • Employees
  • Government
  • Neighbors
  • Competitors
  • etc.

The list can get quite long depending on how specific you get.

Classification of stakeholders

The analysis becomes slightly harder when companies start to classify or order these stakeholders. It is important to give every stakeholder a type of ranking depending on how big the influence on the company is. Yes, customers are among the most important stakeholders but for example, what about the government? Companies that have a big impact on the environment have a different relationship with the government compared to a trading company. It is important to find out which stakeholders are most important. You can ask a question like “How easy is it for this stakeholder to close the doors of the company?”

Action plan

When the stakeholders are identified and classified, an action plan needs to be created on how to manage the different kind of stakeholders. The plan should include ways how the company will inform the stakeholders and regarding which activities every stakeholder is informed of. This can be structured in a communication plan, or very easily and straight forward in the analysis document. When some concrete actions need to be taken, make sure you always assign one single person as the owner of the task. This prevents people from pointing to each other when nothing is happening.

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